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THE KINGDOM OF GODS Road to Kathmandu Desmond Doig and his eye for the unknown By Sunanda K Datta-Ray IN THE KINGDOM OF
GODS This is a labour of love. Doubly so. Nepal was the last stop in the late Desmond Doig's lifelong love affair with the Himalayas and its peoples and lifestyles. Dubby Bhagat, who presents the collection of 60 vignettes, was Desmond's friend and companion and, apparently, helped to research the stories that he wrote and illustrated. Dubby uses the first person plural in the foreword, presumably not as Queen Victoria did but to indicate that the work was a collective effort. That may be true up to a point for Desmond was inseparable from his court and obviously depended on its members in many ways. But the facility with words and the flair with pen and brush were entirely his. No one in his entourage could improve on Desmond's particular gift for visiting a place and weaving a romance of word and picture. Though most, if not all, of these essays originally appeared in The Telegraph, they have not palled. No one would pretend that they are other than slight. But it is enjoyable to read them all over again because the legends and beliefs that they project have already stood the test of time. Some, like the essay on the similarities between the equestrian statues of James Outram, Jung Bahadur Rana and Subhas Chandra Bose are personal reflections, but Desmond usually fastened on local mythology like the tale of the prince who decapitated his father under paternal orders. His distress at erasure of the past comes through in "The Vanishing Courtyard of the Medicine Men"; in others, "Under the Spreading Peepal Tree" for instance, he reveals an eye for sociological detail. Always, he related to what he saw and described. And, always, there was a sensitive drawing with its humorous human touches and sense of glimpsing the mysterious unknown. Desmond was working on a restoration project in Bhaktapur at the time of his death. Educated in Kalimpong and Kurseong, and with a commission in a Gurkha regiment during World War II, he knew the world he depicted. A genuine local would have lacked his amused detachment; a true foreigner would not have shared his insight and sympathy. He was familiar with all the region's leading personalities and their doings. It was surprising, therefore, that he did not write about more portentous events and developments. Perhaps he felt it necessary to tread warily of all the overlapping and conflicting interests in an eastern variant of Kipling's Great Game; perhaps in spite of hob-nobbing with the Himalayan great, he remained unimpressed by the passing show; perhaps the hard stuff really was not his metier. It was just as well. Princely oligarchy, royal autocracy and political populism, a brief explosion in democracy followed by years of panchayati rule and now a full-throated parliamentary system, the kingdom of gods has experienced revolutionary change in the past half-century. Who knows what the future might hold? But the Buddhanilkantha -- "automatic Vishnu" my taxi driver called it because one legend has it that that the massive statue emerged suddenly from the water -- of "A Divine Sleep in Stone" sleeps on, smiling enigmatically from his bed of coiled serpents. Desmond was wise to devote his talents to the eternal instead of ephemera. NEW RELEASES 101 Tips to Survive the City China's Changing National Security
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